“Neither
the intervention decision nor the regime
change decision was an
intelligence-heavy decision,” said one
senior intelligence official directly
involved with the administration’s
decision-making, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity. “People weren’t
on the edge of their seats, intelligence
wasn’t driving the decision one way or
another.”
Instead
of relying on the Defense Department or
the intelligence community for analysis,
officials told The Times, the
White House trusted
Mrs. Clinton’s charge, which was
then supported by Ambassador to the
United Nations Susan E. Rice and
National Security Council member
Samantha Power, as reason enough for
war.
“Susan
Rice was involved in the Rwanda crisis
in 1994, Samantha Power wrote very
moving books about what happened in
Rwanda, and Hillary Clinton was also in
the background of that crisis as well,”
said Allen Lynch, a professor of
international relations at the
University of Virginia. “I think they
have all carried this with them as a
kind of guilt complex.”
Humanitarian crisis was not imminent
In 2003,
Gadhafi agreed to dismantle his
weapons of mass destruction and denounce
terrorism to re-establish relations with
the West. He later made reparations to
the families of those who died in the
bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103 over
Lockerbie, Scotland.
News
media frequently described the apparent
transformation as
Libya “coming in from the cold.”
Still, he
ruled
Libya with an iron grip, and by
February 2011 civil war raged throughout
the country. Loyalist forces mobilized
tanks and troops toward Benghazi,
creating a panicked mass exodus of
civilians toward Egypt.
Mrs. Clinton
met with Libyan rebel spokesman Mahmoud
Jibril in the Paris Westin hotel in
mid-March so she could vet the rebel
cause to unseat
Gadhafi. Forty-five minutes after
speaking with Mr. Jibril,
Mrs. Clinton was convinced that a
military intervention was needed.
“I talked
extensively about the dreams of a
democratic civil state where all Libyans
are equal a political participatory
system with no exclusions of any
Libyans, even the followers of
Gadhafi who did not commit crimes
against the Libyan people, and how the
international community should protect
civilians from a possible genocide like
the one [that] took place in Rwanda,”
Mr. Jibril told The Times. “I felt by
the end of the meeting, I passed the
test. Benghazi was saved.”
So on
March 17, 2011, the U.S. supported U.N.
Security Council Resolution 1973 for
military intervention in
Libya to help protect its people
from
Gadhafi’s forthcoming march on
Benghazi, where he threatened he would
“show no mercy” to resisters.
“In this
particular country —
Libya — at this particular moment,
we were faced with the prospect of
violence on a horrific scale,” Mr. Obama
declared in an address to the nation on
March 28. “We had a unique ability to
stop that violence: An international
mandate for action, a broad coalition
prepared to join us, the support of Arab
countries and a plea for help from the
Libyan people themselves.”
Yet Human
Rights Watch did not see the
humanitarian crisis as imminent.
“At that
point, we did not see the imminence of
massacres that would rise to
genocidelike levels,” said Sarah Leah
Whitson, executive director of the
Middle East and North Africa division
for Human Rights Watch. “Gadhafi’s
forces killed hundreds of overwhelmingly
unarmed protesters. There were threats
of Libyan forces approaching Benghazi,
but we didn’t feel that rose to the
level of imminent genocidelike
atrocities.”
Instead,
she said, the U.S. government was trying
to be at the forefront of the Arab
Spring, when many dictator-led countries
were turning to democracy.
“I think
the dynamic for the U.S. government was:
Things are changing fast, Tunisia has
fallen, Egypt has fallen, and we’d
better be on the front of this,
supporting a new government and not
being seen as supporting the old
government,” Ms. Whitson said.
On the
day the
U.N. resolution was passed,
Mrs. Clinton ordered a general
within the
Pentagon to refuse to take a call
with
Gadhafi’s son
Seif and other high-level members
within the regime, to help negotiate a
resolution, the secret recordings
reveal.
A day
later, on March 18,
Gadhafi called for a cease-fire,
another action the administration
dismissed.
Soon, a
call was set up between the former U.S.
ambassador to
Libya, Gene Cretz, and
Gadhafi confidant Mohammed Ismael
during which Mr. Ismael confirmed that
the regime’s highest-ranking generals
were under orders not to fire upon
protesters.
“I told
him we were not targeting civilians and
Seif told him that,” Mr. Ismael told
The Times in an telephone interview this
month, recounting the fateful
conversation.
While
Mrs. Clinton urged the
Pentagon to cease its communications
with the Gadhafi regime, the
intelligence asset working with the
Joint Chiefs remained in contact for
months afterward.
“Everything I am getting from the
State Department is that they do not
care about being part of this. Secretary
Clinton does not want to negotiate
at all,” the
Pentagon intelligence asset told
Seif Gadhafi and his adviser on the
recordings.
Communication was so torn between the
Libyan regime and the
State Department that they had no
point of contact within the department
to even communicate whether they were
willing to accept the
U.N.’s mandates, former Libyan
officials said.
Mrs. Clinton
eventually named Mr. Cretz as the
official U.S. point of contact for the
Gadhafi regime. Mr. Cretz, the former
ambassador to
Libya, was removed from the country
in 2010 amid Libyan anger over
derogatory comments he made regarding
Gadhafi released by Wikileaks. As a
result, Mr. Cretz was not trusted or
liked by the family.
Shutting
the Gadhafis out of the conversation
allowed
Mrs. Clinton to pursue a solitary
point of view, said a senior
Pentagon official directly involved
with the intervention.
“The
decision to invade [Libya]
had already been made, so everything
coming out of the
State Department at that time was to
reinforce that decision,” the official
explained, speaking only on the
condition of anonymity for fear of
retribution.
As a
result, the
Pentagon went its own way and
established communications with
Seif Gadhafi through one of his
friends, a U.S. businessman, who acted
as an intermediary. The goal was to
identify a clear path and strategy
forward in
Libya — something that wasn’t
articulated by the
White House or
State Department at the time,
officials said.
“Our big
thing was: ‘What’s a good way out of
this, what’s a bridge to post-Gadhafi
conflict once the military stops and the
civilians take over, what’s it going to
look like?’” said a senior military
official involved in the planning, who
requested anonymity. “We had a hard time
coming up with that because once again
nobody knew what the lay of the clans
and stuff was going to be.
“The
impression we got from both the
businessman and from Seif was that the
situation is bad, but this [NATO
intervention] is even worse,” the
official said, confirming the sentiments
expressed on the audio recordings. “All
of these things don’t have to happen
this way, and it will be better for
Libya in the long run both
economically and politically if they
didn’t.”
The
Pentagon wasn’t alone in questioning
the intervention.
The week
the
U.N. resolution authorizing military
force was passed, Sen. Jim Webb,
Virginia Democrat, expressed his own
concerns.
“We have
a military operation that’s been put to
play, but we do not have a clear
diplomatic policy or clear statement of
foreign policy. We know we don’t like
the Gadhafi regime, but we do not have a
picture of who the opposition movement
really is. We got a vote from the
Security Council but we had five key
abstentions in that vote.”
Five of
the 15 countries on the U.N. Security
Council abstained from voting on the
decision in
Libya because they had concerns that
the
NATO intervention would make things
worse.
Mrs. Clinton worked to avoid having
them exercise their veto by personally
calling representatives from Security
Council member states.
Germany
and Brazil published statements on March
18, 2011, explaining their reasons for
abstention.
“We
weighed the risks of a military
operation as a whole, not just for
Libya but, of course, also with
respect to the consequences for the
entire region and that is why we
abstained,” Germany said.
Brazil
wrote, “We are not convinced that the
use of force as contemplated in the
present resolution will lead to the
realization of our most important
objective — the immediate end of
violence and the protection of
civilians.
We are
also concerned that such measures may
have the unintended effect of
exacerbating tensions on the ground and
causing more harm than good to the very
same civilians we are committed to
protecting.”
Sergey
Ivanovich Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador
to the U.S., told The Times that history
has proved those concerns correct.
“The U.N.
Security Council resolution on
Libya was meant to create a no-fly
zone to prevent bombing of civilians,”
said Mr. Kislyak. “NATO
countries that participated in this
intervention were supposed to patrol the
area. However, in a short amount of time
the
NATO flights — initially meant to
stop violence on the ground — went far
beyond the scope of the Security
Council-mandated task and created even
more violence in
Libya.”
On March
19, the U.S. military, supported by
France and Britain, fired off more than
110 Tomahawk missiles, hitting about 20
Libyan air and missile defense targets.
Within weeks, a
NATO airstrike killed one of
Gaddafi’s sons and three grandsons at
their the family’s
Tripoli compound, sparking debate
about whether the colonel and his family
were legitimate targets under the
U.N. resolution.
Mr.
Gates, the defense secretary, said the
compound was targeted because it
included command-and-control facilities.
Even
after the conflict began, U.S. military
leaders kept looking for a way out and a
way to avoid the power vacuum that would
be left in the region if
Gadhafi fell.
As the
intelligence asset working with the
Joint Chiefs kept his contacts going,
one U.S. general made an attempt to
negotiate directly with his Libyan
military counterparts, according to
interviews conducted by The Times with
officials directly familiar with the
overture.
Army Gen.
Carter Ham, the head of the U.S. African
Command, sought to set up a 72-hour
truce with the regime, according to an
intermediary called in to help.
Retired
Navy Rear Adm. Charles Kubic, who was
acting as a business consultant in
Libya at the time, said he was
approached by senior Libyan military
leaders to propose the truce. He took
the plan to Lt. Col. Brian Linvill, the
U.S. AFRICOM point of contact for
Libya. Col. Linvill passed the
proposal to Gen. Ham, who agreed to
participate.
“The
Libyans would stop all combat operations
and withdraw all military forces to the
outskirts of the cities and assume a
defensive posture. Then to insure the
credibility with the international
community, the Libyans would accept
recipients from the African Union to
make sure the truce was honored,” Mr.
Kubic said, describing the offers.
“[Gadhafi]
came back and said he was willing to
step down and permit a transition
government, but he had two conditions,”
Mr. Kubic said. “First was to insure
there was a military force left over
after he left
Libya capable to go after al Qaeda.
Secondly, he wanted to have the
sanctions against him and his family and
those loyal to him lifted and free
passage. At that point in time,
everybody thought that was reasonable.”
Gen. Ham
was ordered to stand down two days after
the negotiation began, Mr. Kubic said.
The orders were given at the behest of
the
State Department, according to those
familiar with the plan in the
Pentagon. Gen. Ham declined to
comment when questioned by The Times.
“If their
goal was to get
Gadhafi out of power, then why not
give a 72-hour truce a try?” Mr. Kubic
asked. “It wasn’t enough to get him out
of power; they wanted him dead.”
Libyan
officials were willing to negotiate a
departure from power but felt the
continued
NATO bombings were forcing the
regime into combat to defend itself, the
recordings indicated.
“If they
put us in a corner, we have no choice
but to fight until the end,” Mr. Ismael
said on one of the recordings. “What
more can they do? Bomb us with a nuclear
bomb? They have done everything.”
Under
immense foreign firepower, the Gadhafi
regime’s grip on
Libya began to slip in early April
and the rebels’ resolve was
strengthened.
Gadhafi pleaded with the U.S. to
stop the
NATO airstrikes.
Regime change real agenda
Indeed,
the U.S. position in
Libya had changed. First, it was
presented to the public as way to stop
an impending humanitarian crisis but
evolved into expelling the Gadhafis.
CIA
Director Leon E. Panetta says in his
book “Worthy Fights” that the goal of
the Libyan conflict was for regime
change. Mr. Panetta wrote that at the
end of his first week as secretary of
defense in July 2011, he visited
Iraq and Afghanistan “for both
substance and symbolism.”
“In
Afghanistan I misstated our position on
how fast we’d be bringing troops home,
and I said what everyone in Washington
knew, but we couldn’t officially
acknowledge: That our goal in
Libya was regime change.”
But that
wasn’t the official war cry.
Instead:
“It was ‘We’re worried a humanitarian
crisis might occur,’” said a senior
military official, reflecting on the
conflict. “Once you’ve got everybody
nodding up and down on that, watch out
because you can justify almost anything
under the auspices of working to prevent
a humanitarian crisis.
Gadhafi had enough craziness about
him, the rest of the world nodded on.”
But they
might not be so quick to approve again,
officials say.
“It may
be impossible to get the same kind of
resolution in similar circumstances, and
we already saw that in Syria where the
Russians were very suspicious when
Western powers went to the
U.N.,” said Richard Northern, who
served as the British ambassador to
Libya during part of the conflict.
“Anything the Western powers did in the
Middle East is now viewed by the
Russians with suspicion, and it will
probably reduce the level of authority
they’re willing to give in connection to
humanitarian crises.”
Mr. Kucinich,
who took several steps to end the war in
Libya, said he is sickened about
what transpired.
He
sponsored a June 3 resolution in the
House of Representatives to end the
Libyan war, but Republican support for
the bill was diluted after Speaker John
A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, proposed a
softer alternative resolution demanding
that the president justify his case for
war within 14 days.
“There
was a distortion of events that were
occurring in
Libya to justify an intervention
which was essentially wrong and illegal
because [the administration] gained the
support of the U.N. Security Council
through misrepresentation,” said
Mr. Kucinich. “The die was cast
there for the overthrow of the Gadhafi
government. The die was cast. They
weren’t looking for any information.
“What’s
interesting about all this is, if you
listen to Seif Gaddafi’s account, even
as they were being bombed they still
trusted America, which really says a
lot,” said
Mr. Kucinich. “It says a lot about
how people who are being bombed through
the covert involvement or backdoor
involvement of the U.S. will still trust
the U.S. It’s heart-breaking, really. It
really breaks your heart when you see
trust that is so cynically manipulated.”
In
August,
Gadhafi’s compound in
Tripoli was overrun, signaling the
end of his 42-year reign and forcing him
into hiding. Two months later,
Gadhafi, 69, was killed in his
hometown of Sirte. His son Seif was
captured by the Zintan tribe and remains
in solitary confinement in a Zintan
prison cell.
Since
Gadhafi was removed from power,
Libya has been in a constant state
of chaos, with factional infighting and
no uniting leader. On Tuesday, an attack
on a luxury hotel in
Tripoli killed nine people,
including one American. A group calling
itself the Islamic State-Tripoli
Province took responsibility for the
attack, indicating a growing presence of
anti-American terrorist groups within
the country.
SO NOW THEY GET LIBYA TO FALL AND THE TERRORISTS TAKE OVER. NO W HILLARY CLINTON AND OBAMA CAN MOVE ARMS TO THE SYRIAN REBELS THROUGH BENGHAZI SO THEY SEND THE AMBASSADOR INTO BENGHAZI TO MEET SECRETLY WITH THE TURKISH AMBASSADOR...
The story picks up from here...
GUN RUNNING TO SYRIAN REBELS... DO NOT LET THESE FACTS BE HIDDEN...
President Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-CIA
Director David Petraeus were part of a gun-trafficking program to ARM
SYRIAN REBELS...that ended up arming the radical jihadist rebels who
stormed the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya on that
fateful day.
BENGHAZIGATE: 1000 times BIGGER THAN IRAN CONTRA....Obama’s Secret
Gun-Running Program is what the State Run Media and Obama do not want
you to know about!
THE IRS AND AP STORIES WERE LEAKED TO COVER-UP THIS STORY!! SHARE AND SPREAD THE INFO.
The Obama Cabal was running guns to Syrian Rebels.
But liberals feign ignorance when the rebels they arm end up
being criminals who kill innocent Americans like the late U.S.
Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens.
Obama was packed off to a safe room so that he could have "plausible deniability".. if the shit hit the fan. It did!
Hell...
this Man who sat in the situation room for photo op pictures ran off to
Las Vegas for a find raiser without checking in as to what is
happening???
REALLY How dumb do they think we are?
UPDATED INFO MAY 2014:
The Benghazi Transcripts: Top Defense officials briefed Obama on ‘attack,’ not video or protest
TRANSCRIPTS SHOW THAT OBAMA AND HILLARY AND THEIR NASTY CABAL LIED:
Minutes after the American consulate in Benghazi came under assault
on Sept. 11, 2012, the nation's top civilian and uniformed defense
officials -- headed for a previously scheduled Oval Office session with
President Obama -- were informed that the event was a "terrorist
attack," declassified documents show. The new evidence raises the
question of why the top military men, one of whom was a member of the
president's Cabinet, allowed him and other senior Obama administration
officials to press a false narrative of the Benghazi attacks for two
weeks afterward.
Gen. Carter Ham, who at the time was head of AFRICOM, the Defense
Department combatant command with jurisdiction over Libya, told the
House in classified testimony last year that it was him who broke the
news about the unfolding situation in Benghazi to then-Defense Secretary
Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff. The tense briefing -- in which it was already known that U.S.
Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens had been targeted and had gone
missing -- occurred just before the two senior officials departed the
Pentagon for their session with the commander in chief.
According to declassified testimony
obtained by Fox News, Ham -- who was working out of his Pentagon office
on the afternoon of Sept. 11 -- said he learned about the assault on
the consulate compound within 15 minutes of its commencement, at 9:42
p.m. Libya time, through a call he received from the AFRICOM Command
Center.
"My first call was to General Dempsey, General Dempsey's office, to
say, 'Hey, I am headed down the hall. I need to see him right away,'"
Ham told lawmakers on the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight
and Investigation on June 26 of last year. "I told him what I knew. We
immediately walked upstairs to meet with Secretary Panetta."
Ham's account of that fateful day was included in some 450 pages of
testimony given by senior Pentagon officials in classified, closed-door
hearings conducted last year by the Armed Services subcommittee. The
testimony, given under "Top Secret" clearance and only declassified this
month, presents a rare glimpse into how information during a crisis
travels at the top echelons of America's national security apparatus,
all the way up to the president.
Also among those whose secret testimony was declassified was Dempsey,
the first person Ham briefed about Benghazi. Ham told lawmakers he
considered it a fortuitous "happenstance" that he was able to rope
Dempsey and Panetta into one meeting, so that, as Ham put it, "they had
the basic information as they headed across for the meeting at the White
House." Ham also told lawmakers he met with Panetta and Dempsey when
they returned from their 30-minute session with President Obama on Sept.
11.
Armed Services Chairman Howard "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., sitting in on
the subcommittee's hearing with Ham last June, reserved for himself an
especially sensitive line of questioning: namely, whether senior Obama
administration officials, in the very earliest stages of their knowledge
of Benghazi, had any reason to believe that the assault grew
spontaneously out of a demonstration over an anti-Islam video produced
in America.
Numerous aides to the president and then-Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton repeatedly told the public in the weeks following the murder of
Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans that night -- as Obama's
hotly contested bid for re-election was entering its final stretch --
that there was no evidence the killings were the result of a
premeditated terrorist attack, but rather were the result of a protest
gone awry. Subsequent disclosures exposed the falsity of that narrative,
and the Obama administration ultimately acknowledged that its early
statements on Benghazi were untrue.
"In your discussions with General Dempsey and Secretary Panetta,"
McKeon asked, "was there any mention of a demonstration or was all
discussion about an attack?" Ham initially testified that there was some
"peripheral" discussion of this subject, but added "at that initial
meeting, we knew that a U.S. facility had been attacked and was under
attack, and we knew at that point that we had two individuals,
Ambassador Stevens and Mr. [Sean] Smith, unaccounted for."
Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, a first-term lawmaker with experience as
an Iraq war veteran and Army reserve officer, pressed Ham further on the
point, prodding the 29-year Army veteran to admit that "the nature of
the conversation" he had with Panetta and Dempsey was that "this was a
terrorist attack."
The transcript reads as follows:
WENSTRUP: "As a military person,
I am concerned that someone in the military would be advising that this
was a demonstration. I would hope that our military leadership would be
advising that this was a terrorist attack."
HAM: "Again, sir, I think, you
know, there was some preliminary discussion about, you know, maybe there
was a demonstration. But I think at the command, I personally and I
think the command very quickly got to the point that this was not a
demonstration, this was a terrorist attack."
WENSTRUP: "And you would have advised as such if asked. Would that be correct?"
HAM: "Well, and with General Dempsey and Secretary Panetta, that is the nature of the conversation we had, yes, sir."
Panetta told the Senate Armed Services Committee in February of last
year that it was him who informed the president that "there was an
apparent attack going on in Benghazi." "Secretary Panetta, do you
believe that unequivocally at that time we knew that this was a
terrorist attack?" asked Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla. "There was no question
in my mind that this was a terrorist attack," Panetta replied.
Senior State Department officials who were in direct, real-time
contact with the Americans under assault in Benghazi have also made
clear they, too, knew immediately -- from surveillance video and
eyewitness accounts -- that the incident was a terrorist attack. After
providing the first substantive "tick-tock" of the events in Benghazi,
during a background briefing conducted on the evening of Oct. 9, 2012, a
reporter asked two top aides to then-Secretary Clinton: "What in all of
these events that you've described led officials to believe for the
first several days that this was prompted by protests against the
video?"
"That is a question that you would have to ask others," replied one of the senior officials. "That was not our conclusion."
Ham's declassified testimony further underscores that Obama's
earliest briefing on Benghazi was solely to the effect that the incident
was a terrorist attack, and raises once again the question of how the
narrative about the offensive video, and a demonstration that never
occurred, took root within the White House as the explanation for
Benghazi.
The day after the attacks, which marked the first killing of an
American ambassador in the line of duty since 1979, Obama strode to the
Rose Garden to comment on the loss, taking pains in his statement to
say: "We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of
others." As late as Sept. 24, during an appearance on the talk show "The
View," when asked directly by co-host Joy Behar if Benghazi had been
"an act of terrorism," the president hedged, saying: "Well, we're still
doing an investigation."
The declassified transcripts show that beyond Ham, Panetta and
Dempsey, other key officers and channels throughout the Pentagon and its
combatant commands were similarly quick to label the incident a
terrorist attack. In a classified session on July 31 of last year,
Westrup raised the question with Marine Corps Col. George Bristol,
commander of AFRICOM's Joint Special Operations Task Force for the Trans
Sahara region.
Bristol, who was traveling in Dakar, Senegal when the attack
occurred, said he received a call from the Joint Operations Center
alerting him to "a considerable event unfolding in Libya." Bristol's
next call was to Lt. Col. S.E. Gibson, an Army commander stationed in
Tripoli. Gibson informed Bristol that Stevens was missing, and that
"there was a fight going on" at the consulate compound.
WESTRUP: "So no one from the
military was ever advising, that you are aware of, that this was a
demonstration gone out of control, it was always considered an attack
-"
BRISTOL: "Yes, sir."
WENSTRUP: "-- on the United States?"
BRISTOL: "Yes, sir. ... We referred to it as the attack."
Staffers on the Armed Services subcommittee conducted nine classified
sessions on the Benghazi attacks, and are close to issuing what they
call an "interim" report on the affair. Fox News reported in October
their preliminary conclusion that U.S. forces on the night of the
Benghazi attacks were postured in such a way as to make military rescue
or intervention impossible -- a finding that buttresses the claims of
Dempsey and other senior Pentagon officials.
While their investigation continues, staffers say they still want to
question Panetta directly. But the former defense secretary, now
retired, has resisted such calls for additional testimony.
"He is in the president's Cabinet," said Rep. Martha Roby R-Ala.,
chair of the panel that collected the testimony, of Panetta. "The
American people deserve the truth. They deserve to know what's going on,
and I honestly think that that's why you have seen -- beyond the
tragedy that there was a loss of four Americans' lives -- is that the
American people feel misled."
"Leon Panetta should have spoken up," agreed Kim R. Holmes, a former
assistant secretary of state under President George W. Bush and now a
distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation. "The people at the
Pentagon and frankly, the people at the CIA stood back while all of this
was unfolding and allowed this narrative to go on longer than they
should have."
Neither Panetta's office nor the White House responded to Fox News' requests for comment.
Why did Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans die in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012?
We now know that President Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton and then-CIA Director David Petraeus were likely behind a
mishandled gun-trafficking program that ended up arming the radical
jihadist rebels who stormed the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in
Benghazi, Libya on that fateful day.
Our CIA is still playing the role of vetting which Syrian rebel
groups will obtain arms including machine guns, ammunition, and
rocket-propelled grenades. While Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are
directly purchasing the weaponry, the Obama administration is aiding the
Arab governments in shopping for these arms and transferring them from
Libya, to Turkey, and finally into Syria.
Unfortunately the CIA has “vetted” shady intermediaries (including
Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood) and shady recipients of thousands of tons
worth of military equipment and millions of rounds of ammo.
Consequently, weapons have fallen into the wrong hands. In the case of
Benghazi, anti-tank weapons appear to have landed in the hands of
terrorists.
Now, Clinton is denying even knowing about the program, although the
evidence indicates it was largely her idea. Of course everything
happened under Obama’s watch and the buck stops with him. The story of
Obama’s gun-running program in Benghazi is long and multifarious, so I
will break down the timeline for you:
May 26, 2012: Stevens arrives in Tripoli, the capitol city of Libya and sets up camp at the U.S. embassy.
Last summer, Clinton first proposed a plan to then-CIA
Director David Petraeus to partner on a gun-trafficking program to arm
the Syrian resistance and “vet the rebel groups, and train fighters who
would be supplied with weapons,” according to The New York Times.
June of 2012: The New York Times reports that the CIA
is operating a secret arms transfer program that sounds exactly like the
plan Clinton developed with Petraeus. Suddenly, there is: “…an influx
of weapons and ammunition to the rebels.”
September 5, 2012: A Libyan ship called Al Entisar (“The
Victory”) docks in the Turkish port of Iskenderun, carrying 400 tons of
cargo including many weapons such as rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs)
and shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles (MANPADS) destined for
Syrian rebels 35 miles away from Iskenderun. The ship’s captain told the
Times of London that the Muslim Brotherhood and the free Syrian Army
broke into a fight over the arms.
September 10, 2012: Stevens arrives in Benghazi, Libya, the
location of the U.S. consulate. About a mile away from the consulate, is
the CIA annex. Stevens planned to stay at the consulate for five days.
His visit was supposed to be secret, but Libya-based extremists somehow
learned of his arrival.
September 11, 2012: Stevens has an unusual meeting with
Turkish diplomat Consul General Ali Sait Akin. Fox News reported that
the meeting was “…to negotiate a weapons transfer, an effort to get SA-7
missiles out of the hands of Libya-based extremists.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham confirmed
on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report with Bret Baier” that Stevens was
in Libya to specifically control a situation: “…where the action was
regarding the rising Islamic extremists who were trying to get their
hands on weapons that were flowing freely in Libya…”
9:40 p.m. (Libya time): Libyan rebels launched and organized an armed attack against the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.
10:04 p.m. CIA base chief at the nearby CIA annex calls for
help including 50-caliber machine guns and vehicles from the Libyan
intelligence, the 17 February Brigade and other Libyan militias. After
24 minutes of calls and no response, the CIA base chief takes a small
team of seven people to the consulate. They were too late to save
Stevens, but were able to save some State Department personnel.
11:56 p.m. CIA officers and the State Department members are
seeking safety back at the CIA annex. There, rebels attack them with
rocket-propelled grenades. Fighting continues on until 5:26 a.m.
6:00 a.m. Libyan forces suddenly arrive to “aid” the American team with 50 vehicles.
It is odd that the annex was attacked with same sort of weapons on
the Libyan ship and that Stevens was reportedly in Benghazi to manage
some sort of arms transfer.
Sen. Rand Paul said
on Aaron Klein Radio: “First of all with regard to Benghazi, I think
it’s important [to determine more about the apparent gun-running
program] because it may have something to do with why the compound was
attacked. If we were involved with shipping guns to Turkey, there was a
report that a ship left from Libya towards Turkey and that there were
arms on it in the week preceding this [attack]; there were reports that
our ambassador was meeting with the Turkish attaché, so I think with
regards to figuring out what happened at Benghazi, it’s very important
to know whether or not the CIA annex had anything to do with
facilitating guns being sent to Turkey and ultimately to Syria. With
regard to arming the rebels, just this week in the armed services
committee, General Dempsey, the [Chairman of the] Joint Chiefs of Staff
said that we were no longer able to distinguish who the good guys were
from the bad guys and that sounds pretty worrisome if we are actually
arming people who in the end may be enemies of America…enemies of
Israel… enemies maybe of the Christians who live within Syria...sending
arms to a rebel force to that may include Al-Nusra and other radical
jihadists.”
Here’s my take: Obama’s gun-running program failed to
properly vet the rebels. Clinton most likely launched the gun program,
expected Stevens to oversee it and then her weapons likely landed in the
hands of al-Qaida affiliates who killed Stevens and three other
Americans. This is a tragic failure of foreign policy and diplomacy
under Obama’s watch. Obama is trying desperately to cover it all up!!
It is becoming increasingly clear that the Obama régime has been
running guns and armaments and munitions to the Muslim Brotherhood and
its affiliate jihadist groups, including heat-seeking
shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles designed to shoot down
jetliners. The American Mission in Libya was apparently trying to buy
back man-portable anti-aircraft missiles that the Obama Régime sold or
gave to the Muslim Brotherhood and then went "missing." The Administration was also trying to buy back weapons previously owned by the Gaddafi Régime that spread everywhere after the "revolution."
Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch
emergencies director, told CNN he has seen the same pattern in armories
looted elsewhere in Libya, noting that "in every city we arrive, the
first thing to disappear are the surface-to-air missiles." He said such missiles can fetch many thousands of dollars on the black market. "We are talking about some 20,000 surface-to-air missiles in all of Libya,
and I've seen cars packed with them." he said. [...] The United States
has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to buy them back [...]
“The rebels came from all over the western mountains, and they just took what they wanted,” said Riyad, a supervisor of the ruined arsenal’s small contingent of rebel guards.
A report by the UN Support Mission in Libya (PDF) said that Gaddafi had accumulated a large stockpile of MANPADs, and that although thousands were "destroyed" during the 2011 military intervention in Libya, there were "increasing
concerns over the looting and likely proliferation of these portable
defence systems, as well as munitions and mines, highlighting the
potential risk to local and regional stability." As soon as islamic organizations outside Libya realized that there were Manpads available, they tried to get them.
When the Obama Régime discovered that thousands of MANPADs had "disappeared" and were "on the loose in Libya" it turned around and stuck a LOT of cash in the CIA "annex", or "safehouse" in order to BUY those weapons back. (I wrote about the CIA annex here.)
Fox News Bureau Chief of Intelligence Catherine Herridge
said that the role being played by the U.S. Mission in Libya is to
control the movement of weapons out of Libya to Syrian rebels fighting
to bring down the Bashar Al-Assad régime. The Benghazi mission played a
key role in “engaging, legitimating, enriching and emboldening Islamists
who have taken over or are ascendant in much of the Middle East,” said
the president of the Center for Security Policy.
From there, we can infer that Ghadaffi was overthrown in order to use
Libya as the doorway to get the arms in for distribution to Syria,
Yemen, Jordan, Egypt and eventually Saudi Arabia. Especially Syria, for
now.
That's the big picture.
The State Department and the
CIA were somehow, some way running or heavily involved in this armament
pipeline. But what was Stevens' function inside this apparatus? What do
we know about it? I suggest that we use this thread to aggregate facts,
data and sources in order to help answering that question.
Only
when we will get to see more clearly what role Stevens played in the
running of this armament pipeline (to the incipient Caliphate) will we
begin to learn "Why the Obama régime wanted him dead?," or at least:
a) Why was the security protection for the Benghazi Mission prior to the 9/11 anniversary attack stripped?, and
b) Why did the Obama régime refuse to send (or even permit) local help on the night of the attack.
How did Ambassador Stevens help in the gun and armament running?
We
know that Benghazi was staffed by CIA operatives, working for the State
Department, whose job was a) to secure and destroy dangerous weapons
(like RPGs and SAMs) looted from Gaddafi’s stockpiles during and after
the 2011 revolution, and b) to facilitate the onward shipment of those
weapons to Syria.
Was Ambassador Stevens' job to cover for all of this?
We know that Obama signed an intelligence finding in early 2012 authorizing U.S. support for the Syrian rebels, and that this summer CIA operatives
were on the Turkish-Syrian border helping to steer weapons deliveries
to selected Syrian rebel groups, most of them “hard-line Islamic
jihadists.”
One of those jihadis was Abdelhakim Belhadj.
Abdulhakim Belhadj, head of the Tripoli Military
Council and the former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, "met
with Free Syrian Army leaders in Istanbul and on the border with
Turkey," said a military official working with Mr Belhadj. "Mustafa
Abdul Jalil (the interim Libyan president) sent him there. -- Ruth Sherlock in Tripoli, 27 Nov 2011, for the Telegraph
Belhadj’s contact with the Syrian Free Army was part of a Lybian
delegation to Turkey offering arms and fighters to the Turkish-backed
Syrian jihadis.
The Daily Telegraph
on Saturday [November 26 2011] revealed that the new Libyan authorities
had offered money and weapons to the growing insurgency against Bashar
al-Assad. Mr Belhaj also discussed sending Libyan fighters to train
troops, the source said. Having ousted one dictator, triumphant young
men, still filled with revolutionary fervour, are keen to topple the
next. The commanders of armed gangs still roaming Tripoli's streets said
yesterday that "hundreds" of fighters wanted to wage war against the
Assad regime.
So we have the United-States, Libya and Turkey working together with
and through Al-Qaeda-linked jihadists like Belhadj to get weapons into
the hands of Syrian rebels, known to be dominated by Al-Qaeda and the
Muslim Brotherhood.
We know also that a Libyan-flagged vessel, Al-Entisar, docked at the Turkish port of Iskanderun on September 6, 2012. 
A mysterious Libyan ship [the Libyan-flagged vessel Al Entisar, which
means "The Victory,"] -- reportedly carrying weapons and bound for
Syrian rebels -- [...] was received in the Turkish port of Iskenderun --
35 miles from the Syrian border -- on Sept. 6 [...] On the night of
Sept. 11, [Ambassador] Stevens met with the Turkish Consul General Ali
Sait Akin, and escorted him out of the consulate front gate one hour
before the assault began at approximately 9:35 p.m. local time.
[A]
source told Fox News that Stevens was in Benghazi to negotiate a
weapons transfer, an effort to get SA-7 missiles out of the hands of
Libya-based extremists.
[...] According to an initial Sept. 14
report by the Times of London, Al Entisar was carrying 400 tons of
cargo. Some of it was humanitarian, but also reportedly weapons,
described by the report as the largest consignment of weapons headed for
Syria's rebels on the frontlines.
"This is the Libyan ship ...
which is basically carrying weapons that are found in Libya," said Walid
Phares, a Fox News Middle East and terrorism analyst. [...]
The
cargo reportedly included surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles, RPG's
and Russian-designed shoulder-launched missiles known as MANPADS.
The
ship's Libyan captain told the Times of London that "I can only talk
about the medicine and humanitarian aid" for the Syrian rebels. It was
reported there was a fight about the weapons and who got what "between
the free Syrian Army and the Muslim Brotherhood."
"The point is
that both of these weapons systems are extremely accurate and very
simple to use," Fox News military analyst Col. David Hunt explained. He
said the passage of weapons from Libya to Syria would escalate the
conflict. "With a short amount of instruction, you've got somebody
capable of taking down any, any aircraft. Anywhere in the world."
[...]
In March 2011, the Reuters news service first reported that President
Obama had authorized a "secret order ... (allowing) covert U.S.
government support for rebel forces" to push the Libyan dictator Muammar
Qaddafi from office.
At a hearing on March 31, before the House
Foreign Affairs Committee, several lawmakers raised concerns about the
finding reported by the Reuters news service and whether the Obama
administration knew who constituted the rebel forces and whether
Islamists were among their ranks.
"What assurances do we have
that they will not pose a threat to the United States if they succeed in
toppling Qaddafi?" Republican Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla.,
asked. "There are reports that some opposition figures have links to Al
Qaeda and extremist groups that have fought against our forces in Iraq."
[...] A month after the October 2011 death of Qaddafi, Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton announced in Tripoli that the U.S. was
committing $40 million to help Libya "secure and recover its weapons
stockpiles." [...]
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/10/25/was-syrian-weapons-shipment-factor-in-ambassadors-benghazi-visit/
The group accused of moving the weapons is the Foundation for Human Rights, and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH).
U.S.
Ambassador Chris Stevens’ last meeting in Benghazi the night he was
killed was with the Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin, who is
reported to have been there to discuss a weapons transfer or a warning
about the possible compromise of the Libyan weapons pipeline to Syria.
Whatever the topic of Ambassador Stevens’ discussion with Akin, he
clearly and knowingly put himself in harm’s way to be there, in
Benghazi, on the night of September 11.
NOW YOU KNOW HOW HILLARY AND OBAMA TIE INTO THIS BIG BLOODY MESS!!
NOW YOU ALSO KNOW WHY GENERAL PETRAEUS IS BEING BLACKMAILED INTO SILENCE ...BECAUSE HE KNOW!!
REVOLT PATRIOTS...
THIS IS A DEEPER BLOOD Y MESS THAN YOU KNOW!!
